


A Ghost Story

by TrillianSwan



Category: Hamlet - Shakespeare
Genre: Creepypasta, Explicit Language, actual text plus gloss/paraphrase, mostly fie becomes f-bomb, nightmarish dreamlike encounter, seriously he cusses a lot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-25
Updated: 2019-06-25
Packaged: 2020-05-19 19:26:10
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,819
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19362874
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TrillianSwan/pseuds/TrillianSwan
Summary: AU - Modern Day. Hamlet is the son of a Texas state senator. Horatio is trying to piece together what happened to his friend, since he only knows part of the story. His investigation leads him to a throwaway Reddit account Hamlet had used to post his real-life encounter with his father's ghost as a creepypasta story. This is the text from that story.(Taken from a longer piece I was working on.)





	A Ghost Story

**Author's Note:**

> The only other thing you need to know is this:
> 
> Horatio had heard from Marcellus and Bernardo that there was a ghost in the woods in the local park. They went out one night to investigate, got really freaking scared, and managed to capture a blur that could be a ghost. Horatio posts this on YouTube, where Hamlet finds it and then goes on to investigate this ghost himself. Because captured on the tape is a man Horatio thought was just going to his car, but it was actually Hamlet's dead father.

I saw a ghost last night. I can’t stop shaking, I can’t talk… I haven’t been able to form words until I could get to my computer. I tried to talk to my girl, fuck I actually broke into her bedroom window. I grabbed her arm, I looked into her eyes… and she looked terrified. Of me. I was sweaty and filthy from running through the woods, my clothes were torn… plus we had recently broken up and everything was all weird and we weren’t actually speaking to each other and here I was bursting into her room and grabbing at her… I lost all my words then. Words, words, words... I had to get out of there, get away from her, keep all my shit out of her life. I took off back out the window and ran straight home for my laptop.

Now I have so many words I can’t get them all out or arrange them in any way. My hands are still shaking and that is making it hard to type, too. But I need to get this out, I need to write it down, I need to remember before I forget.

 

Because I promised.

 

Shit. Shit. Shit. Motherfucker-- oh god, literally! I am losing my fucking mind.

I mean, it was real, right? It seemed so real. He was real. And if he was real, then everything is real and now the floor is tilting out from under me again.

I guess I need to tell you first that my dad died and my motherfucking Uncle Creepy is now married to and consequently literally fucking my mother.

And there is more, so much more, but you don’t care about my fucked up family drama. You are here for a ghost story, and this is a hell of a one.

 

There is a video on YouTube that looks like all the other dumb REAL GHOST shit that you and I and everyone else has spent a night or two getting drunk and clicking on one after another. This one got linked to me on Twitter by someone I went to highschool with, because it was made by a guy who I sort of knew from back then. 

I never even got to the ghost part-- I mean, I did I guess oh god-- because at the top of the video this guy-- let’s call him Harry-- bumps into a man that LOOKS JUST LIKE MY DEAD DAD. I mean, I know I am still grieving and shit but this was not a trick of the eye or anything, it was literally my fucking father. First, panic. Then, reason: this must have been shot before he died. 

Then, wondering what the hell my father was doing coming out of the woods at night. He was a state senator, for god’s sake, and not the sort to do a bit of night jogging. Was he like… up to something? I mean, he was a man, take him for all in all, but I never knew him to be the sort of guy who would be up to shady shit.  But then the way he died, it defies belief. Taking a nap on the patio and getting bit by a snake?! I mean COME ON WHO BELIEVES THAT FUCKING BULLSHIT. But instead of investigating it, we are all just going along with this stupid bullshit cover story and never mind you don’t want to hear me go on about that.

You came for the ghost.

I can’t even concentrate on the details of how I got ahold of Harry and told him that he had accidentally caught a now-deceased state senator coming out of the woods. But whatever, the important part is, he had filmed it ONE WEEK AGO. 

My dad died like two months ago. Or four months? Or something. Time is… weird.

And yes, readers who came for the ghost, you already saw him because that was the fucking ghost of my father.

It was already late afternoon when I got this out of Harry and I was in the woods that night. I would go every night if I had to. He was there, or had been there, and I wanted to see him more than anything. That feels like years ago.

 

Let’s cut to the ghost.

 

I am running, trying to keep up with the figure in front of me. It’s not that it floats, I can see its hips moving as if it is walking, but I can’t make out his legs and at any rate he often clips through trees and rocks and small rises in the earth so there is something happening that is… unsettling.  I have been chasing the figure for a few minutes-- or hours, maybe? I’m not sure. He seems clear and solid like in the video, but any part of him I look directly at goes sort of… blurry, or distorted into shadows. It is very dark out here, and my flashlight quit working some time ago. Maybe it’s that. I keep concentrating on the not-legs because I absolutely cannot think about its face… my father. But I am out of breath and the ground keeps listing and finally I stop and call out to it.

“Where wilt thou lead me? speak; I'll go no further!”

It stops and turns, somewhat closing the distance between us. “Mark me.”

“I will!” I cry out. 

“My hour is almost come, when I to sulphurous and tormenting flames must render up myself.”

Its face crumples and I feel an overwhelming wave of sadness and fear and guilt come off of him, that slams into my chest and spreads through my body, where it is met with my own. Poor bastard.

But it is off again, clipping unsettlingly through the woods, and I am off after it again. Even though my mind feels like it is about to split in two I do know I need to know what it is saying, and I can only catch snatches of it.  I try to keep up, I try to listen, the figure and its voice are definitely ahead of me but then, very close in my left ear as if I could feel hot breath, I hear it say,

“I am your father’s spirit.”

I think I am screaming. But the figure continues to move ahead of me as if it does not know what it has just done, and I am still running after it. I am not screaming any more, I have to listen, I have to hear.

“...to walk the night, and for the day confined to fast in fires…”

“...crimes done in my days of nature are burnt and purged away…”

“...freeze thy young blood, make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres…”

It stops suddenly and moves back at me at lightning speed. “List, list, O, list! If thou didst ever thy dear father love--”

“O God!” I cry, as its face looms at me, huge and distorted. 

“Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder.”

I fall to my knees in the mud. “Murder!”

 **“** Murder most foul, as in the best it is; but this most foul, strange and unnatural.” The face has retreated some now and suddenly he becomes… my father. My father. I lean towards him, filled with love and grief. He studies me closely.

“I find thee apt,” he says, and seems to drift off in thought for a moment. But then he raises a hand and places it on my head.

Sparks and fireworks are going off in my head, I can’t see anything but exploding light. And then I can see our backyard patio, and Dad taking a nap on the chaise lounge. I can feel the late afternoon spring sun and smell the cedar. I can hear his voice in my ear as before, now taking on a rhythm that beats with my heart as I watch the action unfold.

“Sleeping within my orchard,

My custom always of the afternoon,

Upon my secure hour thy uncle stole,

With juice of cursed hebenon in a vial,

And in the porches of my ears did pour

The leperous distilment…”

Like a movie, now I am in close-up. I can see my father’s five-o'clock shadow and above his sleeping face, the face of my uncle leering down at him. I can smell his stinking scotch breath. He pours a liquid into my father’s ear.

“My uncle!” I scream, and now I am in the woods again, on my knees in the mud, and the ghost of my father is on the move again. I scramble to catch up as I hear him rave ahead of me.

“Ay, that incestuous, that adulterate beast, with witchcraft of his wit…”

“...to his shameful lust the will of my most seeming-virtuous queen: O [XXXXXX], what a falling-off was there!”

We are still moving through the woods and brush, I do not know where we are but the woods are getting thicker, pressing in on me, I can feel the whole world pressing in on me.

“...upon a wretch whose natural gifts were poor to those of mine!”

“...So lust, though to a radiant angel link'd, will sate itself in a celestial bed, and prey on garbage!”

“O, horrible! O, horrible! most horrible!”

“...a couch for luxury and damned incest…”

Suddenly it is beside me, I nearly run past it. Just a man, my father, sitting dejectedly under a tree, idly tearing apart a piece of wild grass he has picked. He speaks quietly, no longer raving. “But, howsoever thou pursuest this act, taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul contrive against thy mother aught: leave her to heaven,” he says sadly, as he begins to tear harder at the plant in his hands. “And to those thorns that in her bosom lodge, to prick and sting her…” 

And then he is gone, and I am alone in the woods, dripping with sweat and mud, my clothes torn and my breath ragged. Then a voice speaks at my ear again.

“Adieu, adieu! Remember me...”

O God what the holy FUCK?!  O earth! what else? I am in fucking hell! O, fuck! My heart is racing and the floor keeps tilting. Remember you! Yes right up until my mind finally breaks in two… Remember you! Fuck, I am deleting every other fucking thing from the databanks, all the stupid movie quotes and lists and observations about fucking life and all the bullshit I was worried about yesterday, hard reset. Loading up nothing but this from now on, dumping all the distracting bullshit.

O most pernicious woman! O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain! Note to self-- one may smile, and smile, and be a villain; hang on to that little fucking tidbit of knowledge. 

Now to my word. It is 'Adieu, adieu! remember me.'

I have sworn it.

 

**Author's Note:**

> I started out trying to create a web series of Horatio's investigation, but it was slow going as I don't have the necessary chops to make a web series, as it turns out. :) 
> 
> I have since discovered this site and thought I'd post this one piece of it. If you're interested in more, please let me know in the comments. It's definitely possible for me to flesh this out into a multi-chapter story instead, and at least that would be a way for me to finish it.


End file.
